How Quiet Riot Tried to Sabotage Their ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’ Cover

Frankie Banali has revealed the lengths Quiet Riot went to in the hope of sabotaging their cover of the Slade song "Cum On Feel the Noize," saying that they set out to make the recording an “intentional train wreck.”

Even though the 1983 single broke Quiet Riot and led to them becoming the first metal band to reach the top of the Billboard album chart with Metal Health, they didn't want to record the song, and it was only done at the request of producer Spencer Proffer.

In 2005, singer Kevin DuBrow – who died in 2007 – told ClassicRockRevisited, “I never loved that song, but by the same token I never thought we were the greatest songwriters in the world. We were gullible and I was an angry guy at the time.”

In a new interview with Michael Aubrecht, Banali shared his own memories of the experience. “The producer wanted us to record it," he said. "I didn’t care one way or the other, but Kevin despised the song. Slade were not the type of band I would have listened to. We all came up with the idea that we’d tell the producer we were working on that song, although we never did. The inevitable day came when we actually had to record it, and in theory it was supposed to be an intentional train wreck. We wanted to make it so the producer couldn’t even use it if he wanted to."

When they got to the studio, Banali recalled, he "went into the engineering room and told [Proffer] that we hadn’t worked on the song and that we were going to tank it. I said he might want to record it to be funny. He said, ‘Okay.’”

Banali remembered starting the song from the wrong place, and leaving out a verse and chorus – but the band’s plan didn’t come to fruition. “Kevin was waiting for it to fall apart, but we just kept playing,” he said. “It’s in my DNA to do the best job I can, so I vamped, and it turned out to work within the song. When we finished, the producer said it sounded great on the first take. The engineer happened to record it, and when we listened back, it worked. Kevin was furious.”